De Koo in Perpetua

Paintings by Colescott on the left and Ramos on the right: Installation view at the new Rose Art Museum

One more addendum to two themes from earlier this week—the reopening of the Rose Art Museum (here), and my albeit very personal response (which has become, over the years, increasingly disapproving) to the Woman series on display in the De Kooning retrospective at the MOMA (here):

Former Rose Art Museum director Carl Belz was instrumental in bringing two pieces into the Rose collection that make their homage—on many levels—to De Kooning‘s still controversial paintings. One is by Mel Ramos and the other by Robert Colescott. They hang together, both large pieces, and seem to carry on the conversation that started so many years ago.

From the commentary provided at the Rose:

A giant of postwar American art, Willem (Bill) de Kooning, painted one of his most iconic words, Woman I, during the early 1950s. Former Rose director Carl Belz wrote in 2011 that it “inspired and haunted an entire generation of young painters,” who saw it a the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Two of those painters are Mel Ramons…”I Still Get a Thrill When I See Bill #1″…and Robert Colescott, “I Gets a Thrill Too When I Sees De Koo”…

In 1980, Belz curated the exhibition, Mel Ramos: A Twenty Year Survey, which included “I Still Get a Thrill When I See Bill #1” on loan. A year later, Belz’s friend Senator Bill Bradley gave Colescott’s painting to the Rose. The Ramos came up for auction in 1996, and Belz seized the change to add it to the collection.

Belz describes having the Colescott and Ramos on view simultaneously “as a postmodern appropriation, as an ironic comment about the comment about the creative act, as an oblique yet moving tribute, as a pictorial exploit, you name it, it [is] all there.

I also liked this quote from Ramos in 1980:

I was just really troubled by Willem de Kooning’s paintings at one time. So it was quite a challenge for me actually to try to attempt to do that painting just sort of outright, blatant, straightforward—here’s Woman No. 1—and still make it, you know, a Ramos painting.

…it was the kind of things that I was doing with that painting, that is, the involvement with the paint istself, the painting of brushstrokes, that is, the reconstituting of those brushstrokes, painting them visually the way they appear in magazines, as opposed to the way they actually appear on the paint, on the surface, which has nothing to do at all with the way they appear in magazine. You’re conscious of just so much energy and inhuman speed and transitory thoughts when you look at that work. So my painting is actually a painting of a reproduction of it, although it’s been slightly altered. I added breasts. I made a nude out of it. I painted it all flesh.

4 comments

This is so interesting, Deborah. I also read Carl Belz’s blog entry about these pictures. I personally have always been very resistant to de Kooning because of the Woman paintings that I thought just so misogynistic. These two, especially the Colescott, are great because they so closely appropriate the de Kooning piece with a humorous swipe at it. Good for Carl in getting these two for the Rose and how nice that they were hanging side by side for the Rose’s reopening.

I have to laugh, reading those titles for the Ramos and Colescott works, although I also find a lot to appreciate in Ramos’s commentary on de Kooning, that is, seeing the work in person versus the reproduction in print.

Putting the Ramos and Colescott side by side offers an opportunity for fascinating discussion of how to make appropriation one’s own while maintaining the garishness of image common to all three paintings. I can admire technique and style and how paint’s laid down and still consider the image grotesque.

Thanks Nancy. If you do go to see the De Kooning in NYC, I would be curious to know if your sense of the Woman series changes the way mine did. I went from a misogynist reading to more of an aesthetic head shake of nope, this doesn’t work for me at all.

Yes, Maureen, I too found Ramos’ commentary about copying from a reproduction very au courant and provocative. You can’t not smile when you look at these 2 works.

Altoon, I’m with you on the Colescott. Amusing on so many levels, particularly when viewed right next to the Ramos. Belz’s quote touches on that.